Adult Sudden Death Syndrome
This is from the Tuesday, May 1, Kuwait Times.
Beijing: A Chinese judge charged with corruption died in his cell from “adult sudden death syndrome”, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. Investigators said Li Chaoyang, 38, had been uncooperative while in detention in Xing’an county . . . “Cuts on his face and other injuries” had been caused by a fall during an escape attempt,” they said. . . .
Shi Shaosen, head of the Guilin municipal law enforcement supervisory section and chief investigator int he case, said the prisoner had not been maltreated.
“Li Shaoyang’s sudden death conforms with adult sudden death syndrome, said Shi, citing a forensic report. Li’s relatives had claimed there were wounds on his body, a gash across his lip and one of this front teeth was missing.
They had questioned the cause of his death and wrote about it on a blog. . . .”he was naked, and bruises could ber clearly seen on his face, neck and back. My brother was just 38 years old, he had been in perfect health and hardly ever fell ill” said Ki Xiuqing. “I suspect the visible bruises on his body were caused by torture.”
You can read the rest of the report at the Kuwait Times.
There really is a Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. You can get more information about it HERE. Note the “normally non-traumatic, non-violent” part. This is part of the information they give:
What is SADS?
In a medical context the term SADS is most often used in reference to Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome. However in recent times the phrase Sudden Adult Death Syndrome or SADS has been adopted by the media for referring to the more general notion of a sudden death of an apparently fit and healthy young person. To avoid confusion it is important to understand all definitions of SADS when discussing different conditions or syndromes.
The use of the word ‘adult’ enables the distinction between different forms of Sudden Death Syndrome, making the distinction between Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – SIDS and Sudden Adult Death Syndrome – SADS.
Sudden Adult Death Syndrome events are defined as non-traumatic, non-violent, unexpected occurrences resulting from cardiac arrest within as little as six hours of previously witnessed normal health.
Welcome, Earthling!
The commenter on this blog known as Earthling, now has his own blog under his own name. A geographer with GoogleEarth, he has frequently given info and tips on Google Earth which I have passed along to you.
His blog is a hoot. Matt is a picky eater, surrounded at Google by free, high quality food in huge abundance and variety, and that is what he is blogging about. Maybe he will also show their on-site laundry and gym facilities 😉
In spite of his self-proclaimed picky eating habits, Matt is a very good cook, a creative cook, and I always loved it when I could hear him puttering around in the kitchen because something good was going to come out of it all. His one food addiction is hot peppery sauces, and his Jambalaya is so fiery I can’t eat but a bite or two.
Here is a Matt story (every family has these stories):
One day Matt’s Mom was making dinner when Matt, about fifteen at the time, walked in and asked “what’s for dinner?” She told him. Twenty minutes later the delivery man from a local restaurant pulled up and rang the doorbell – Matt’s dinner had arrived. Matt’s Mom was dumbfounded, and then laid down the law – if she was going to all the trouble of fixing dinner, her family would eat it! No delivery!
You can find him HERE at Google-Food-Spot.
Check in and give him a big welcome, please.
April 30 Blogging Silence
April 30 provides an opportunity for all bloggers to honor the victims of violence in this world by remaining silent. I will be honoring this moritoriumm, and will neither blog nor comment tomorrow.
It’s such a small thing. I wish I were doing more.
NYT Article on “Shiitization of Syria”
My neice, Little Diamond wrote this morning referring to an excellent piece entitled Catalytic Conversion about persistent rumors of “Shiitization” in Syria. The article, by Andrew Tabler, is from today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine section, begins here:
The Middle East is abuzz with talk of “Shiitization.” Since the war in Lebanon last summer, newspapers, TV news channels and Web sites in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have reported that Sunnis, taken with Hezbollah’s charismatic Shiite leader Hassan Nasrallah and his group’s “resistance” to Israel, were converting to Shiite Islam. When I recently visited the semi-arid plains of eastern Syria, known as the Jazeera, Sunni tribal leaders whispered stories of Iranians roaming the Syrian countryside handing out bags of cash and macaroni to convert families and even entire villages to Shiite Islam.
You can read the original article from the New York Times Sunday Magazine section HERE.
“You’re Fired!”
Today on AOL Jobs Section is an article on how difficult employers find firing an employee, even employees they know are lazy, have addiction problems, or are persistently late or absent. The Fonz discusses this, and other work related issues while blogging from one of his two or three different jobs.
“You’re fired” isn’t a phrase that rolls off Ed Cook’s tongue. The owner of a Stone Mountain, Ga., State Farm agency, Cook recently became concerned about an employee who spent far too much time chatting on her cell phone at the office. The last straw was an hour-long personal call she made while he was out on business. When he confronted her and she shrugged it off, Cook decided — then and there — to let her go. In his 30 years at the agency, that was only the sixth time he had ever fired anyone.
“It kills me to have to fire an employee,” Cook says. “I lose sleep over it. But when I’m paying someone to work, I expect them to work.”
While television bosses — from Trump, to Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons, to Michael Scott on The Office — gleefully terminate employees with abandon, real-world employers are far more hesitant.
In a recent national survey, 61 percent of small-business owners said they find it hard to fire employees — even bad ones, according to SurePayroll, a Chicago-based small-business payroll firm.
“The survey confirms our belief that small-business owners struggle with many HR issues and would prefer to focus instead on growing their businesses,” says SurePayroll president Michael Alter. “Firing employees is particularly difficult.”
That’s why as many as 78 percent of business owners said they prefer to put it off as long as possible, the survey found.
Francisco Dao, the founder of StrategyandPerformance.com, a San Francisco-based executive coaching and consulting firm, remembers working at a financial firm alongside a full-blown alcoholic.
The Kuwait Left Turn
I actually first came across the first left turn in Saudi Arabia, and would watch in horrified fascination at the stoplights. Saudi Arabian driving was the worst I have seen, ever, anywhere in the world, but the driving has some inner logic if you are there long enough to get used to it. (I had thought I would hate not driving, but in Saudi Arabia, I was happy not to drive.)
In Saudi Arabia, there was no respect for lanes at all. At a junction there might be four legal lanes; one marked for people turning left, one for people turning right, and two for going straight ahead, but when the light turned red, there would be six or seven or eight cars lined up, all squeezed together, almost door to door. If there is a space, a car will fill it.
And maybe four or five of those cars would turn left, but not necessarily the four cars closest to the left. One might be in the far right turn lane, but going left. Yes, there were accidents, but not so often as you would think.
In Kuwait, they have refined the right-turn-lane-left-turn down to an art. I’ve gotten so used to it I hardly notice it any more, and that is why I am blogging about it now, so I will have it down before it falls of the screen.
Here is how it works. The guy in the far right lane realizes he needs to turn left. First move – he turns the wheels left and inches forward. Second step – this is optional – he gets the attention of the guy to his left and indicates he needs to go left. This is done with a combination of desperate looking eyes and a hand motion. Third step – he continues inching forward. Last step – just as the light is about to change/is changing he shoots out into the intersection, across four lanes of traffic, making his left turn.
There’s no honking. People are used to it.
That the lane second to the left also often goes left, although it is marked to go straight ahead, is a given.
It happens so often, we take it for granted.
The second variation on a left turn is that in Kuwait there are long stretches between stoplights or roundabouts, but there are conveniently marked areas where you can make a u-turn. There are left turn lanes that make it easy. But often, there are people who don’t want to get in line, or maybe realize too late that this is where they need to turn. No problem. They just get right up next to you and start edging their way in. It can be really scary when that someone is a big cement truck, or a bus full of workers.
Sometimes there can be two or three cars making that left turn at the same time. You would think it would be a disaster, and somehow, it all seems to work.
All this is . . . . very creative, refusing to be limited to what the law says is permissible. The problem becomes switching tracks when you go back to a country where the laws are less flexible.
Qatteri Cat’s Amusement
This week, my window washers were back, but this time they did not catch me by surprise! I had read the notice posted by the elevator, and closed my sheers so that they couldn’t look in and see me blogging.
The Qatteri Cat, however, thought this was great stuff. He yearns to be an outdoor cat. He remembers the early street life, and then the green garden he called his own, and the occasional escape over the wall and down to visit the neighbors. In his innermost cat nature, he wants to be free to roam, free to follow his cat nature.
So this morning, the window washers provided great excitement in his hum-drum contained life. The window washers stopped briefly to “Miao” at him and tap the window to tease him a little – great fun, if you are a cat. I could hear his loud purring from ten feet away!
Bloggers Search for Anonymity
On Friday, 13 April, BBC published a report by David Reid about bloggers need for anonymity. Because in many countries of the world the government is trying to track and limit bloggers, he recommends a handbook published by the media rights group, Reporters Without Borders, called The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.
You can read the article by clicking on the blue type above. Reporters Without Borders offers the booklet as a free download when you click here.
Reporters Without Borders has it’s own website here where they summarize some of the main events of each day. They also keep a tally of the number of people worldwide who are imprisoned for blogging related activities.
Breakfast at the Scenic Diner
We love places like the Scenic 90 Diner, in Pensacola, Florida, where local people go to meet and exchange news and gossip and to “chew the fat”. This diner was no exception. They had great breakfast foods – the $3.99 Scenic Special had two eggs, any way you like them, grits or fried potatoes, toast or biscuit, and you could add bacon or sausage for just a little more. They also had a fruit bowl and a granola/yoghurt special for the tennis Moms, but it looked to me like most of them were having the eggs special, too.
The outside looks like an old fashioned (but very modern and upscale) diner:
The interior was equally stylish:
And here were some friendly locals, willing to have their photos taken. They had never heard of “blogs” before:
You can see some of the black and white photos the owner has used to decorate the diner in the background. The food was excellent, individually prepared, the service was also good, and the entire experience reminded us of how good it is to have places in communities where people can gather or even just run into one another to catch up on local news. Prices were reasonable, although not as inexpensive as the chains – Denny’s, Waffle House, etc. We also really like it when the police are a part of the community, and not someone to be afraid of. The Scenic 90 Diner also serves lunch and dinner.
Google Earth Adds New Layers
Google earth, according to OogleEarth has just added some new layers, one in particular of which highlights what is going on in Dharfur, and ties it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which tracks deaths, attacks, and refugees in the Dharfur region.
Many thanks to my source at GoogleEarth and greetings, Earthling! (I love saying that!)
Mediawatch: Covering the new Darfur default layer in Google Earth
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 (10:38 UTC)
Hundreds of media organizations carried news about the new Darfur layers in Google Earth — and that’s just in English. In Sweden alone, over 40 papers ran the news (an example). In the US, many local news organizations and papers ran the AP or Reuters story. Here’s a rundown of links to some of the larger and/or more interesting ones, with some observations at the end:
Using their own correspondents: The Los Angeles Times (business), BBC (front page feature), CNET (front page, and as a top headline for media 2.0), CNN (technology), Washington Times (business), PC World, ABC News (world news) and a good article/blog in Wired.
Reuters: Australia’s The Age (under technology), New Zealand Herald (world news), The Australian (world news) and Scientific American (science news).
AP: Seattle Post Intelligencer (business), MSNBC (technology), The Guardian (world news), Sydney Morning Herald (technology), the Houston Chronicle (markets), Seattle Times (world news), CBS News (technology), Baltimore Sun (world news), Washington Post (technology), San Jose Mercury News (breaking news), San Francisco Chronicle (business), Denver Post (world news), International Herald Tribune (Americas??) and the Sudan Tribune (which is a great resource for Darfur news, it turns out — pity they don’t have RSS).
AFP: Times of India (world news), iAfrica (technology) and Baku Today (technology).
IDG News service: IT World and InfoWorld.
What’s interesting is that there is no consensus among news editors as to where such a story belongs: Is the story’s most important news component the fact that there is a genocide being perpetrated in Darfur (world news), that new technologies are being employed to educate people about Darfur (technology), or that Google is involved (business)? In a sense, the situation in Darfur is not itself a “news” story, in that we all already (should) know what’s going on there. (If anything, the news is that it’s getting worse at the moment, and people I know who work there are doing so without much hope of a resolution anytime soon.) But putting the story in the technology section relegates it to a spot not followed by the people that the technology is most aiming to reach.
I think this is above all a story about how new technology is letting us all be witnesses to a genocide in progress, and how that raises our own responsibilities — so perhaps this is a story best also told in the glossy Sunday newspaper magazines, read when people have more time to play with Google Earth and where there is more room for long-form stories about larger technology trends coupled to humanitarian crises such as Darfur, but also Katrina/New Orleans and the Pakistan quake from 2005. How about it, New York Times?
My opinion: This has got to be one of the greatest blogs on earth. And he emphasis added in the above paragraph is mine.
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